Is anyone else sad that we have adopted HTML/CSS as the universal lingua franca for describing views? I understand why (or at least I believe I do): HTML/CSS is an inevitable part of the ecosystem because the web is an important target. A lot of devs will know at least some, and your organisation may already have loads of them because you also need to target the web. Maybe you even already have some view code written…
> The problem is that it's bad. I say this as someone who comes from the outside, and isn't an expert ("barely competent" in HTML/CSS is probably accurate). Basic layout of things in a way that copes with different screen sizes/orientations is a surprisingly black art sometimes. There's a lot of history confusing the issue and three ways of doing each thing. How can you say this with a "barely competent" level of exp…
Not necessarily inherently, more as a result of taking a set of tools that were originally designed for doing one thing - creating hypermedia documents - and repurposing it for creating rich application graphical user interfaces. Which is ultimately a very different problem space with different needs and design constraints.
I'm also struck by the total development effort required. Once upon a time, the GUI was something that the whole dev team pitched in on. Hopefully a designer was guiding the work. But all the programmers could easily pitch in on the actual implementation, with minimal up-front training. Nowadays, the work often goes to specialists, and "full stack" is actually a thing people highlight on their resumés, rather than something that goes without saying.
Perhaps that has nothing to do with the technology. Some of what's going on is undoubtedly just that all professions become more specialized as they mature. The bar for what counts as a good UI has also raised quite a bit over time. And the actual ask is quite a bit more impressive, too. A single GUI codebase that can dynamically adapt to everything from a smartphone screen to a large computer monitor, without looking janky at any point in between, is something that, to my knowledge, has never been asked of a Visual Basic application.
But still, even given all that, it's hard not to at least wonder if we could have ended up in a better place if we had been given a technology stack that had been designed from the ground up for the problem domain, rather than having to make do with something that was never meant for this problem domain, but has been adapted to it through the accretion of many layers of hacks.